Mr. Speaker, in November last year, the BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition released its B.C. child poverty report, which shows the growing income inequality among B.C. families that have one in five of our children living in poverty, a statistic that has not changed in two decades.
In my own riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, the city of Duncan is highlighted as having the highest child poverty rate of 31% for an urban area in B.C. These are not alternative facts; they are a damning indictment of policy failures from successive Liberal and Conservative governments.
In fact, it was just recently that the Liberals shamefully voted against the creation of a national poverty reduction strategy.
It is a sad state of affairs when a country as wealthy as Canada continues to display these kinds of statistics. My colleagues and I in the NDP will never rest so long as poverty and inequality continue to exist in Canada.